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Sunday, 30 June 2013

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

I recently gave a speaking test to a class of 8- to 10-year-olds.
One prompt-sheet had illustrations of various items such as a horse, tree,
telephone, bicycle, and so on. The majority of the students could name most of
the items with the exception of the telephone. The problem was, it seems, that
it was a standard 1980s phone, complete with hand-piece, cord, etc; something that’s
completely alien to the young students. For them a telephone is a slim,
tablet-shaped thing you carry in your pocket.

This got me thinking about how out-of-date the topics and
language we teach are. English as it’s taught in the classroom is nearly always
a decade or two behind what you might call up-to-date English. The English
language is constantly changing, and consequently the nature of the language
and the topics we teach should be constantly revised to keep pace. This doesn’t
usually happen; we’re almost always lagging way behind. We are, in fact,
teaching yesterday’s, redundant expressions and topics to our students. Text
books are largely responsible for this; a book printed in 1998 can hardly be expected
to present English as it is spoke today. Let me give you a few examples.

In most text books you’ll see short phone conversations to
be drilled for memorization.

“Can I speak
to the doctor, please.”

“Yes. Just a
moment.”

(The last
recorded instance of a patient being able to speak to a doctor was in 1976.)

“I’d like to
place a person-to-person toll call to Mrs Joyce Abercrombie in Nowheresville,
Ohio.”

(Nowadays
you just dial Joyce’s cell phone number.) Oh, did I say ‘dial’ then? No, dials
were replaced by keypads decades ago, but our language doesn’t yet have a verb
to describe the tapping in of numbers on a keypad.

Now, when
was the last time you were approached by a shop assistant? Honestly? And,
should you ever track down a shop assistant, when was the last time you chanced
upon a helpful one? (That is if the assistant spoke any English.)

Nowhere is
the illustration of how out-of-date text books are than in the ‘Famous People’
units. Perhaps, at the time of printing, (and for a certain age group), people
like Lady Di, Julia Roberts, the Beatles, Nelson Mandela, Marilyn Monroe and
JFK were indeed famous, but they have never even entered the realm of young
learners’ experience. Mr Bean, Tom and Jerry, and David Beckham perhaps, but
those others are just yesterday’s forgotten people. Hell, most students
wouldn’t even know Superman from Donald Duck! It brings home to you just how
much you’re getting on in years.

Some grammar rules we teach are on the brink of becoming
redundant.We stress to our students
that singular nouns require a singular ‘be’ verb, but as likely or not
expressions like “How’s things?” and “There’s ten people waiting” regularly
crop up in our everyday speech. We teach that ‘someone’ and ‘anyone’ are
singular nouns, but say: “If someone knows the answer, will they please raise
their hands”, and “If anyone thinks they can do better, they’re welcome to
try”.

We painstakingly teach the correct usage of ‘who/whom’ and
‘neither/nor’ to our students, but outside the classroom we, along with most
our contemporaries, ignore it. We stress that ‘so’ should only be used before
an adjective or adverb, but today’s in-people say “Those jeans are so bling”
and “My new android blue-tooth touch-screen cell phone is, like, sothis year”. We teach rules about how to correctly use ‘if’ and ‘whether’ and
‘like’ and ‘such as’, but immediately forget those rules in our everyday
speech.

“Now remember, Class, don’t ever start a sentence with
‘and’. It’s a conjunction, alright? And if I see anyone doing it, they’ll be
penalized.”

Which brings
me to the subject of vocabulary. New words are entering the language every day,
but text book writers seem to be in denial of this fact. Some examples:

Of course your students don’t need to add all these
expressions to their vocabularies, but if an advanced student reads the
newspaper, he or she will come across them regularly.

“Dear Sir, Pursuant to your request in your esteemed communiqué
of the twelfth (inst)...” Of course, no-one (except, perhaps in India) writes letters
like this anymore, but you’ll still come across the occasional textbook that
presents this antiquated language as normal. Nowadays we teach letter-writing
in a less stilted, formal fashion, but when you come to think of it, why do we
teach letter-writing at all? In fact no-one writes letters any more. They send e-mails
or text messages instead. Or tweet them, or twitter them. Or post them on
FaceBook.

Yep, our text books and our lessons are way behind what
you’d call contemporary . What someone needs to do is, like, write a totally cool
book with all the, like, up-to-the-minute language us people use every day,
like. I mean that would be so 21st Century. Anyone out there up to
it?

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My new book, EFL minus the B.S. (now available on
Amazon) is my take on the English teaching game world-wide. From language
teaching theories, linguistics, classroom dynamics, teens’ and children’s
classes, to sex and the single teacher.